Tapputi: The First Chemist

Around 1200 BCE in Babylonian Mesopotamia, a woman named Tapputi-Belatekallim (literally "female palace overseer") appears in a cuneiform tablet as a royal perfume-maker. She engineered mixtures using flowers, oils, calamus, myrrh, and resins, then added water or solvents and distilled and filtered repeatedly, employing the oldest known still. Because her recipe was attributed "from the mouth of Tapputi," scholars credit her as history's earliest recorded chemist and one of the few women named in ancient scientific texts.

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